Rush of Blood by Mark Billingham - Book Review

I have to confess that I have not read a Mark Billingham book before and that’s quite surprising seeing as he has written, or has had published, around twelve of the things.

The book opens in Florida where three Brit couples who did not know one another before, begin socialising around the pool, in the restaurants and bars.

There’s an American woman there too, a singleton, though she appears to have a number of strange men friends, and she’s holidaying too with her young teenage daughter, a pretty kid, though a bit slow.

But when the young kid is found dead in the mangrove swamps a full-scale murder enquiry is launched and of course the Brit couples can’t talk of anything else.

The holiday’s soon over and back in Britain someone decides it would be a great idea to meet up, and, conveniently, as they all live within an hour’s drive in the south-east of England, they agree to do just that, embarking on a series of dinner parties.

I’ll be good to catch up, they say, and they can talk of the young girl again and that weird case in Florida which has never been solved.

But then a second girl goes missing, locally, and minds are suddenly turning over every which way. Surely that can’t be a coincidence. Could one of the guys have dark secrets that no one could guess at, or even one of the women, come to that? Spooky!

The book is written in the third person, except when the reader is jolted from the straight and narrow, when the killer starts telling it how it is in the first person.

The book is also written in an easy to read jaunty style and rarely drags.

I did find it quite difficult to differentiate between the three couples on occasion, Sue and Ed, Angela and Barrie, and Marina and Dave, at least I think that’s the right way round, though I couldn’t be sure, I kept having to remind myself who was married to who, all fairly nondescript names, and for me I would have liked a little more clearly defined characters, they were all a bit samey. Maybe the characters just weren't strong enough. Maybe that was the idea.

But that apart, Rush of Blood is a decent effort, and if you like murder mystery thriller type things then you will probably like this too.